What Don't You Like About "Batman Forever"?

I can honestly say I'm glad to hear concrete reasons why the movie is disliked. Most people I talk to just say how much better the other movies are, and don't say why the others are bad.

That said, to me the difference between the quality of Batman: Forever and Batman & Robin was that B&R took the stuff that was bad with BF (the "liberties") to an extreme that was impossible to ignore. I can live with completely revamping a character when it enhances rather than detracting the story. Hell, TAS more or less single-handedly made Mr. Freeze relevant by mostly revamping him.

Batman & Robin is fun to rewatch for sheer awfulness. I barely made it through it in the theater (second run theater, which wasn't the nicest locale, either). Uma is so straight forwardly drag-queenish as Ivy. Arnold uses every cold pun in the book. Alicia Silverstone is flat out terrible. O'Donnel is worse than in Batman Forever. Clooney is like Adam West (often saying his dialouge seriously despite ridiculous situations around him) with a little more one-liner flippancy (Hi, Freeze, I'm Batman." "This is why Superman works alone."). The subplot with Alfred dying that we are supposed to care about but don't because it overshadowed by cast changes and the excessively campy feel of the rest of the film.

Shit, Schumacher even coaxes a bad performance out of John Glover. That's a crime bigger than freezing Gotham City!

I loved Batman Forever when I saw it during it's release...except for the nipples and Chris O'Donnell as Robin. Everyone has done a pretty good job at relating what is wrong with this movie. I don't especially mind that Schumaker decided to return to the campy 60's style Batman but I think he could have it better. What are some of the things I don't like about Forever?

1. Chris O'Donnell as Dick Grayson/Robin: I have nothing against the actor, my beef happens to be they decided to make Dick older, I think he was 17 or 18. Why the fuck would Bruce Wayne decide to adapt a 17 year old when he will probably end up leaving in a couple of years anyways. Dick should have been 13 or 14 and maybe gone with an unknown in the role. I've said it before and I'll keep saying it again...Dark Victory does an excellent job of handling the Robin origin. It's dark and moody. Dick is scared and frustrated when he's brought to the mansion. Wonders why Bruce is always gone and abandoned him when he needs someone to talk to...Alfred's fine but Bruce has gone through the same thing. Then he finds the Cave and everything changes. Robin handled correctly could bring a new dynamic to movie Bruce Wayne, force him to adapt and accept the responsibly of being a father.

2. Two Face: They cast someone like Tommy Lee Jones, an excellent actor who can easily do straight up drama and turn a tragic and angry character like Harvey Dent into a comedic farce! I didn't mind the overplaying of the split personality...mostly because we get to see a hot Drew Barrymore and Debi Mazar! The best part of all of Tommy's appearances in the film is when they show Bruce watching video footage of Harvey getting scarred. You can actually see Val trying to be emotional in that scene.

3. Val Kilmer as Bruce Wayne/Batman. Ugh. Too bad Michael Keaton left the role...I thought he was tremendous as Bruce/Batman. Val was very wooden as some have stated. He has some moments as Bruce...but I didn't buy him as the character.

4. The Riddler: Over the top to the max. I liked him as Edward Nigma and his jealous of Bruce Wayne after Bruce rejects his project. Nigma was more deeper a character than Riddler was. JOYGASM basically explains my beef with the character

5. Batmobile....why was it necessary to change the look of the Batmobile? I loved the updated Batwing but hated the Batmobile.

(If it's just a matter of not liking the performance as much, I can understand that; Schwarzenegger is pretty one-note as Freeze.)

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Well that is what I meant. They turned Bane into a bodyguard flunky. Batgirl, was wrong in every way you can imagine. Mr. Freeze actually turned out to be a different kind of bad guy which was different.

I mean you can't get mad about Batman villians, that is what they do even on the loved BTAS. The Joker is in it for laughs, Poison Ivy for the plants, Mr. Freeze deals out cold vengeance, The Riddler wants everyone to know he is smarter than they are, and the list goes on.

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I still think that on paper, in theory that there was nothing wrong with casting Uma Thurman and Arnie as the bad guys. It's just that something went wretchedly awry with the writing, more or less.

^ Uma was fine. Arnie - not so much ... I think Freeze is a pretty stupid character anyway, but Patrick Stewart or Jeremy Irons might have made something interesting of him. But they wouldn't have made much of him with that terrible script.

7. Val Kilmer, like Jones is a decent actor...most of the time. I honestly forget he ever played Batman. He doesn't register, not even as Bruce Wayne.

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Kilmer sort of ends up as the George Lazenby of the Batman universe. Everyone remembers Keaton, we all know Bale because he's the current guy, and Clooney made a dent just by virtue of how awful Batman & Robin was. Kilmer was just there, and was totally overshadowed by his costars. Even with Nicholson hamming it up in Batman, and DeVito being grotesque and Pfeiffer vamping in Returns, Keaton always managed to carve out a space for himself in those films. Kilmer was literally overwhelmed by Carrey and Jones (and even O'Donnell to a certain degree).

I enjoyed Forever when it was first released (I was 15 then), but it hasn't held up at all. Burton's take on Gotham as a city may have been grotesque and brooding and Gothic, but at least it looked like it was tethered down to reality on some level. In Forever, you start getting the ludicrously tall buildings, and the ludicrously tall elevated highways to go with them, but even that pales to the ri-goddamn-diculousness of Gotham in Batman & Robin (elevated highways miles off the ground, an observatory in the palm of the hand of a ginormous fucking statue). The production design was just obnoxious on every level... neon and lasers and smoke, the "organic" look of Batman's new vehicles, the Batmobile actually rising out of the ground on a giant spinning platform. Meh.

I actually sort of enjoy Batman Forever, because - let's be honest - neither of Burton's Batman movies were exactly perfection either, and Forever at least has a kind of endearing camp gleefulness.

But it was still a mess. Hell, they screwed up Two-Face's big introduction shot by cutting to the security guard at the exact moment they should have been revealing that he had, y'know, two faces. And that was right at the beginning, so it set the tone for the rest of the film. The horrible screeching score ("BLUWAAA! BLUWAAA! BLUWAAAaaaAAAAaaaaAAA!"), the 5 mph car chase, the out-of-nowhere Sonar Batsuit to save the day and especially Two-Face's split personality being almost entirely ignored in favour of literal "Muwah hah hah!" Jokerisms were all dreadful, while Kilmer and Kidman were just... bland.

Carrey was still fun, though. For some reason, the game of Battleships and his line of "A waterrrrrry GRAVE!" always get a laugh from me.

I prefer Elfman's scores for the two Burton films, but one of the few things I solidly do like from Forever was Elliot Goldenthal's score. It felt kind of jazzy and obnoxious in places, but so did the movie.